Faculty Activity Report Season

Figure 1. Sheaf sheaf ply sheaf.

FAR season. Annual faculty activity report season. Workload percentages in each semester must add up to 100%. Except for those who agreed to overload administrative responsibilities in spring which were offset in fall. Or the reverse. You whose workloads are atypical, say so by adding parentheses to standard workload percentages. The parenthetical percentage offsets can look like this, (+20%) and then this (-20%). A workload can tip, lean, favor one semester, but then it must balance again, like a semi trailer at a weighing station. “What is the pressure in your tires? Over.” “Eighty-nine give or take, but that should be enough. Over.” “Ten-four.”

What did you even do, really? Whirload percentages are in section one. Provide context but not too much. The committee is tired and has dozens of these to read. Include supporting documentation if needed but really and truly please don’t. Rubrics are a modern extension of rubine, rubrication, the red ink used in medieval European manuscripts for emphasis. Each section of the workload agreement will be rated using a rubric. The textual part of the rubric uses language you might be familiar with from everyday life, namely, High, High Normal, Normal, Low Normal, and Low. These words are too long and so they are abbreviated to H, HN, N, LN, and L. How are you feeling today? HN. What mood is the cat in this afternoon? LN. What would you like to have for dinner tonight? N. Numbers are more authoritative. Each descriptor lines up with a range of numbers. The numbers are doing the real and keen mathematical work behind the scenes. They are engineered with greater precision than the human eye can discern, especially when drawn all the way down to the thousandths place. If you require a magnifying class, so be it. For example, a high normal day could be a day rated as 6.001 or it could be as amazing as 7.999. Decimal places in rubrics are almost like context in that they can bring us up close to the microscopic details. Like Serres writes in Branches, accounting expedites.

What do you mean you have not been keeping up with data entry in the eFAR system? You’re not in trouble trouble; you just have months of data entry to do. The eFAR system is a grand database where every faculty employee fills in blank fields, thereby creating records of the work they do. Some records are autogenerated. Teaching and course evaluations, for instance. Some records are presented as hedges, machine guesses, speculative possibilities: “Are you the author who should receive credit for any of these 49 publications whose author teams have names resembling your name?” Then from the eFAR system, output a report. You will need to make careful revisions to the vast majority of the translations from the raw database to the .doc form. Don’t whine about it. It is what we have and we are thankful. Plus you are not alone. You are among friends and colleagues who also are carrying the weight of periodic reductive reflection. Low Normal years are a part of life. Low years, too. High years. Normal years. During FAR season, surrender to the old you. Remember the best parts and know they will be translated fairly and equitably from the hundredths place into next year’s cost of living pay increase. Submit the completed FAR to Canvas. Exhale normally. Watch the snowflakes fly. Now you are dallying. Next year’s FAR cycle is already underway. You have an article to review. A pair of emails needing responses. A conference abstract to draft. Fractions of points to earn.

Discomfort Inventory

Catching singedwhiff of burnout or year-end case of the enough-alreadies (it’s like the slows but more existentially introspective), I was looking ahead to February 1’s deadline for Faculty Activity Reports, trying to reconcile Virginia’s 60+F temperatures with December, and regrouping after an unusually challenging writing program administrative week. Sometimes you take a hard look, you know?, and remember these orbits are few, the lifting not entirely yours to heft. I keyed in the neighborhood of eight “comfort inventories” from 2004-2011, but then a decade passed and for those ten years, none. Wonder why. Today, in the spirit of FAR anticipation (FARticipation would be a whizpopper portmanteau but risks poor poor taste), keen on the feelings a’coursing through the great resignation, a discomfort inventory for 2021.

  • Chaired 2 faculty searches that brought 9 new colleagues (4 TT, 5 instructors). In the last 2.5 years, that brings it to 4 searches for 25 new colleagues.
  • Completed 2 external reviews for tenure and/or promotion. I could’ve said yes to 2 more, but I just couldn’t. In a balanced year, 3 are possible; this year, only 2.
  • Reviewed 1 book manuscript. A terrific book which I cannot wait to teach, but I wrote to the publisher this week and learned it won’t be out until September 2022.
  • Reviewed 4 articles (Enculturation, CCC x 2, Intermezzo)
  • Co-led a workshop on daily drawing for the Lifelong Learning Institute
  • Gave an artist’s talk about the pandemic bestiary
  • Prepped the pandemic bestiary for the Squires gallery, and then submitted 1 piece, which sold for $225, to the Artful Lawyer show in downtown Blacksburg. With this, I’ve made more cash from illustrations than from writing in this life.
  • Did 44 illustrations. I think? Could be more. But at least 44.
  • Gave an invited talk and teaching workshop at U Virginia in January (virtually)
  • Sent Radiant Figures into the world (i.e., published chapter and co-edited collection)
  • Taught 1 section of Technical Writing
  • Wrote 9 letters of recommendation
  • Bought a 70-year old house in a bona fide hollow and a used car (Honda Civic).
  • Drove the Michigan-Virginia roundtrip 6.5 times
  • Interim co-directed the Center for Rhetoric in Society
  • Committees: 7. Served on Comp, Ex Comm, RW, Professorial Personnel, ad hoc Teaching Evaluations, CID Advisory, and LVE Community Engagement Committee, chairing or co-chairing two of these. Must give up 2 in the year ahead.
  • Coordinated 4 Writing Program Dialogues sessions (WAVA and/or UVa)
  • Highlight of highlights: presented at the CID, “Lines Drawn Home,” with Ph. and Is.
  • Published a co-authored chapter in Composition as Big Data
  • Co-developed/co-piloted SSWPI placement system, but breakdowns have us redrawing things (generative failure, in effect). This included receiving 300 emails from first-year students in June alone.
  • Served on 10 dissertation committees; 3 who graduated in 2021; 2 new ones; chairing 2
  • Co-authored or co-sponsored 2 course proposals: 1) Food Writing and 2) Advanced Writing and Research.
  • To date, I’ve done exactly 200 transfer equivalency reviews; in all of 2020, there were 182. Up is up!
  • There’s more: promotion to professor, serving on various boards, including CWPA and WAVA, again negotiating and executing a program textbook, illustrating its cover, and so on, but this is a pretty thick-cut slice of what the year has held, and I know for casting it as I have that the volume, it’s nope not sustainable.